


don't get cut (on my edges)

by extasiswings



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Feelings Are Difficult, Honey Over Knives Queen, POV Female Character, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 06:38:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6504781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/pseuds/extasiswings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>He's soft</em>, Stick says that first night he finds her again, sliding a photo across her very expensive table towards her. </p><p>  <em>He's soft. But you can fix that.</em></p><p> As it turns out, she can't. As it turns out, she's the one who ends up bruised.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't get cut (on my edges)

**Author's Note:**

> In general these two give me a lot of emotions, but Elektra in particular is very precious to me and Elodie Yung's portrayal was flawless. If you haven't seen season 2, this is probably going to be confusing. If you have, this runs through about the middle of ep. 7.

Elektra Natchios doesn’t have weaknesses. She spends her life burning them out of her one by one, until she’s steel and stone, until nothing can touch her. She wanders through life, slipping between masks effortlessly—society princess, heartless warrior, mindless coed—and she’s good at it, she enjoys never being one thing for too long, like smoke in the air, gone before it can be captured. 

(Her classmates call her an ice queen and she doesn’t feel the need to turn and point out that she’s not ice at all, that she burns inside and didn’t anyone ever tell them not to play with fire?)

Elektra doesn’t have weaknesses…until she meets him. 

_He's soft,_ Stick says that first night he finds her again, sliding a photo across her very expensive table towards her. 

_He's soft. But you can fix that._

And because it's Stick who asks, Stick who she's never quite forgiven for leaving her with Hugo and Christina, but who she still wants to...what? Make proud? (She doesn't dwell on that because it makes her stomach twist uncomfortably). Because it's Stick, she takes the photo and pulls one of her best dresses from her closet and goes on the hunt. 

 

( _He’s with me,_ she says later, and Matthew reads her far better than anyone should be able to, but especially a blind man, even one who’s been through Stick’s brand of training. It hits close enough to home that she wonders if going forward is a mistake, if she shouldn’t abandon the entire mission, because warning bells are ringing in her head. She pushes them away instead because she’s intrigued, fascinated by this man and the shadows she sees inside of him)

 

They have sex that first night in the passenger seat of her stolen car, quick and rough and almost fully-clothed. Elektra bites his lip hard enough to draw blood when she comes, and when she showers later that night, she finds bruises from his fingers on her hips. There’s something thrilling in it, she thinks, something thrilling in him. A wildness, a darkness, and she wonders if they could be the same, if he’s the one person who could really understand. She wonders if he recognizes that too. 

It’s not always that way though. Fogwell’s is the first shift—he starts touching her more carefully, not when they spar, but the rest of the time. At least at first, it grates at her when he does it. It takes her awhile to realize it's not something he does to mess with her or tease (well, mostly), but rather something he needs as much as she needs their back-and-forth snap and snarl. 

 

( _Three months in and they’re in her penthouse—"Matthew—" Elektra pushes herself up and makes to turn over when he stops her with a gentle hand between her shoulder blades and presses his lips to her spine._

 _"Please," he murmurs, barely a breath against her skin, and there's something—she's never heard his voice so quiet, full of emotion but guarded, as if she won't hear it if he just speaks softly enough. "Let me do this?"_

_He'll stop if she says no, of course. He'll stop and probably let her flip them and push them back into teeth and nails and everything that comes with that. And for a moment she's tempted to do just that, because sex is one thing, but the intimacy of this might just shatter her._

_She doesn't stop him. Instead she sighs and arches into his lips, and there are warning bells at the back of her head again, but she forces them out again. There’s something intoxicating in the paradox of his hands—knowing the violence they’re capable of, but feeling the way they’re more gentle against her skin than anyone’s have ever been—and she blinks hard to get rid of the burn at the back of her eyes and lets herself be carried away_ )

 

At six months Elektra wants to push. She finds Roscoe Sweeney, sets everything up perfectly like a gift. She doesn’t realize how badly she’s miscalculated until Matthew is shaking in the middle of the room and there’s a knife clattering to the floor. 

She runs. She's feels like she's bleeding inside, like she's ripped something out of herself, or like he has, and there's a scream caught between her molars. She wants to vomit. 

_Go back,_ a voice whispers in the back of her mind. _Go back and explain, tell him everything—you can fix this, you can fix anything, make him understand—_

She thinks of Matthew's face, of the way he'd looked at her, of _I thought I did, too_. She thinks of the people she's killed, the ones whose faces she remembers and those she doesn't. She thinks of Stick, of the pause on the other end of the phone the week before when she'd checked in before _get it done, Ellie, don't be an idiot..._

She doesn't go back. 

Stick's waiting for her in the penthouse when she returns, but he says nothing when she sweeps through the door without even giving him a second glance. There's an open bottle of Macallan on the countertop, and it's such a simple thing, but it makes her freeze. 

_"You know me like no one else ever has. And I know you. We belong together."_

A beat, a breath, and then a sound escapes her throat, a scream and a snarl all in one, and she throws the bottle at the wall. The shattering doesn't make her feel any better. 

She grips the counter, tries to breathe, to think, but everything is _Matthew, Matthew, Matthew,_ and it _hurts_ —

"Oh, Ellie," Stick sighs from behind her, and she can't discern if it's disappointment or sympathy or judgment or something else entirely. She bites her tongue hard enough that she tastes copper. 

"Give me something to do," she forces out, the words scraping her throat as they pass through. "Give me _anything_ to do. But whatever it is, let it be far away from here." 

He's very quiet, and the memories playing in her head get louder in the silence, until finally—

"Istanbul," he says. "You can leave tonight, I'll give you the details on the flight." 

She doesn't thank him. She doesn't have to. 

 

("You've never been hard to find," she tells Matthew years later, and it's the most honest thing she says in the whole conversation after _I missed you_ even though she's sure he thinks it's the only honest thing she says. She's been back to New York on more than one occasion and she can never help looking in on him—it's always from a distance, from the shadows, and it always tears the stitches she's carefully placed in her chest, but she does it anyway)

 

When she returns, things move more quickly than she expected. He’s snippy and short with her and it’s as amusing as it is painful, which is why she doesn’t hold back from baiting him, but he’s also achingly familiar, and it’s a dangerous game she’s playing with herself. 

The party is the best and the worst—the elation of finding the ledger and the rush of the fight an intoxicating combination—and she knows Matthew feels the same when he doesn't argue with her ridiculous plan of _I'm drunk and we snuck away to have sex_. When she hops up onto the desk and pulls him to her, she nearly shivers. 

"They're in the stairwell," he murmurs in her ear as her fingers work at unbuttoning his shirt and pushing it off his shoulders. His voice is all heat and shadow and when his hand falls to her thigh, tracing the path of the slit in her dress, her skin burns under the touch. She wants to bite him. She digs her nails into the back of his neck instead. 

His teeth drag over her pulse point in retaliation and the moan that escapes her is far closer to genuine than she’d prefer. He smirks. _Asshole._

(She could take him, she's fairly certain. Slide into his lap in the car as she had their very first night and scratch, mark, _claim_. But. She shouldn't. She won't. Because _no sex_ was as much for her as for him and at the end of the day she's not _actually_ trying to break his new relationship before it even starts) 

Working with Matthew though, fighting by his side, being his partner is exhilarating...and incredibly dangerous. Not physically, although there have certainly been some cuts and bruises, but every moment she spends with him wreaks havoc on her carefully crafted control, rips through her barriers and the compartments where her emotions are usually kept locked up tight. 

Something has to give eventually, she knows. But whether it's him or her who will be left feeling it the most, she can't be sure. 

 

"Why didn't you come back?" Matthew asks her nights later, after stitching her up with careful hands.

 _Would you have wanted me to?_ The words are sharp and defensive on the tip of her tongue, but she swallows them back and considers, truly and honestly, what the real answer is. There are so many. 

_I was hurt. I was protecting myself. I wanted to stop lying to you. You're a good person and I'm not._ (The last one stings)

What she settles on is as close as she can get to the whole truth without telling him absolutely everything—even though she knows she's going to have to tell him and soon. 

"Because you don't know what I know," Elektra replies, her mind pulling up memories of knives flashing in the dark, of _it's a monster_ and _what's wrong with me_ and _no one is going touch you, Ellie_. "Because you deserve better." 

His face is a study in vulnerability, naked and open with so many emotions bleeding together (tenderness, regret, pain, love— _god, could he really still_ —) and when he blows out a breath and looks away, sits up, she has to stop herself from looking at him because she can barely breathe. There's something cracking inside her, crumbling, and she can't stop it. 

"Lie down. Get some rest." It's a deliberate retreat, though what he's stopping himself from doing she isn't sure. 

_Stay with me_ , she wants to say, because it feels wrong to sleep alone on his couch after that, after stitching and scars, and he's just across the room—

 _He's just across the room_ , she realizes. He didn't vanish into his bedroom, eager to get away. Whatever's going through his mind, whatever this strange energy is between them, he's not quite running from it. Not when he's standing just a few feet away, watching over her like it's the most important thing he could possibly be doing. 

It takes her an age to fall asleep because she can feel his focus, the energy almost tangible in the air, dancing over her skin as he listens to her heart, her breathing, every swallow and shift. She wonders what that means to him, the things he hears. Can he hear the way her chest twists with want—not for sex, but just for him to touch her, even innocently...maybe especially innocently—the electricity that zips under her skin when he's close? Does he know what that means?

Does he know that she loves him? 

(She thinks he might. She thinks he might still love her, too) 

_I suppose we’ll find out_ , she thinks, and then she’s gone, drifting into dreamlessness.


End file.
